Elyse Discher

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Much like her previous standalone novel, The Witch Elm, Tana French’s The Searcher meanders its way into a mystery with a deliberate patience. Cal Hooper is an outsider in his rural Irish town, and before he can be ensnared by a missing person case, Cal—and by extension the reader—must get his footing in his new community. It’s this nuance, a signature of French’s writing, that makes this novel more than just a mystery; it’s also an exploration of rural poverty and the closely intertwined lives of people who are just trying to scratch out a living.

Cal is a former Chicago detective burned out from his job, licking his wounds after his divorce and struggling to reconnect with his adult daughter. His decision to move to Ireland and fix up a ramshackle farmhouse feels impulsive, but Cal is almost immediately centered by the beautiful landscape and by the kindness of his neighbors. Gossip gets around through, and soon Cal finds 13-year-old Trey Reddy on his doorstep. Trey’s 19-year-old brother Brendan has vanished and Trey believes that he’s been met with foul play.

The Irish police, and indeed Brendan’s own mother, believe Brendan left of his volition. The Reddys are poor, Brendan didn’t make it into college, and his girlfriend recently broke up with him. With few prospects, it’s reasonable to assume that he fled to Dublin like many teens before him. Trey’s insistence rattles something in Cal, however, and as he begins a quiet investigation into Brendan's disappearance, he realizes that his tiny community is full of secrets and people who don’t want Brendan found. French scrapes away at the idyllic landscape of rural Ireland and reveals the vices that plague every village and town, including drugs like methamphetamine. As the book progresses, Cal’s idyllic country adventure begins to rot around the edges.

What sets The Searcher apart from French’s earlier novels is its depiction of how deeply intertwined the residents of the village are—with young people leaving the area, farms struggling and poverty and drug use plaguing the area, each person is somehow dependent on his or her neighbors for survival. This is not a place where Cal can bury his head in the sand. Evocative and lyrical, The Searcher is a mystery worth reading slowly to savor every perfectly rendered detail.

Much like her previous standalone novel, The Witch Elm, Tana French’s The Searcher meanders its way into a mystery with a deliberate patience. Cal Hooper is an outsider in his rural Irish town, and before he can be ensnared by a missing person case, Cal—and by extension the reader—must get his footing in his new […]
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The Less Dead by Denise Mina opens with a personal crisis that explodes into a compelling thriller. Glasgow-based physician Margot Dunlop is facing down the chaos in her life: her adopted mother has recently passed, she’s broken up with her boyfriend, her best friend is being stalked and she has just found out she’s pregnant. Trying to make sense of her world, Margot reaches out to the agency that facilitated her adoption to get in touch with her birth mother, only to learn that she was murdered shortly after Margot’s birth.

From here we descend into the dark underbelly of Glasgow. Margot’s mother was a sex worker and heroin addict, her murder left unsolved by a police force that considered her subhuman. Margot meets her aunt Nikki, also a former sex worker and addict, and learns that her mother’s case was far more complex than a trick gone wrong. Nikki believes that her sister was killed by a corrupt cop, and has received threatening letters that provide details only the killer could know. Margot isn’t sure she wants to be involved in the case, but she isn’t given a choice when the killer begins stalking and harassing her as well.

Mina’s novel stands out in a genre that commodifies the dead bodies of women. Her characters are nuanced, complicated and never stereotypes, and her portrayal of the world of sex work isn’t lurid or voyeuristic. Furthermore, Margot is not the middle-class savior some would mistakenly believe that these women need. And although Margot’s mother was a victim of a violent crime, Mina juxtaposes her murder with the stalking of Margot’s best friend, Lilah, showing that women are the subjected to violence by the men in their life at every socioeconomic level.

As Margot seeks justice for her late mother, she’s introduced to a community of women, some still addicts, some still sex workers, who protect and care for one another, even as they are shamed and shunned by society at large. The Less Dead is at once a gripping thriller and an examination, and vindication, of a group of women who are often faceless, unsympathetic victims.

The Less Dead by Denise Mina opens with a personal crisis that explodes into a compelling thriller. Glasgow-based physician Margot Dunlop is facing down the chaos in her life: her adopted mother has recently passed, she’s broken up with her boyfriend, her best friend is being stalked and she has just found out she’s pregnant. […]
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Set in mysterious and witchy woods, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is the perfect read for mystery lovers who prefer thrills without gore and violence. Author Eve Chase embarks on a deep character study of two women, both of whom are entangled in the tragic events of one summer day in 1971.

Live-in nanny Rita is sent off to Foxcote Manor in the Forest of Dean to care for precocious Teddy and troubled teen Hera while their socialite mother, Jeannie, recovers after the stillbirth of a child. Awkward, shy and utterly devoted to her charges, Rita struggles to balance Jeannie’s depressive episodes with the family’s paranoid patriarch’s demands that Rita act as a spy. When Hera finds an infant abandoned in the forest and Jeannie wants to keep her, Rita is forced into even more lies.

All the while, the forest around them feels claustrophobic and menacing. From the strange arrival of the baby to moved objects to suddenly unlocked gates, Rita feels as if Foxcote Manor is being visited by some sort of supernatural presence.

As the culmination of family secrets comes to a boil in 1971, London makeup artist Sylvie is struggling in present day. Her mother is comatose after a fall, and her teenage daughter is harboring a secret. When Sylvie finds newspaper clippings in her mother’s house about an abandoned infant and a mysterious murder in the Forest of Dean nearly 50 years ago, Sylvie realizes she knows nothing about her family.

The Daughters of Foxcote Manor draws its intensity from the secrets of its main characters, and as the summer of 1971 draws to a close, Chase builds a frenetic momentum. The slightly gothic atmosphere of Foxcote Manor and the surrounding woods adds an element of fear to an already fraught environment. While all the violence happens off-page, the galloping pace and dangers faced by both Rita and Sylvie keep this mystery from ever feeling cozy.

Set in mysterious and witchy woods, The Daughters of Foxcote Manor is the perfect read for mystery lovers who prefer thrills without gore and violence.
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Catherine House, the debut novel by Elisabeth Thomas, defies categorization; it is a coming-of-age story, a thriller, science-fiction and a Gothic novel all at once. These elements should feel incongruous, but in the strange world of Catherine House they blend together in a way that makes perfect internal sense.

Ines is a young woman running from her past. Once a dedicated student, her life changed dramatically during her senior year of high school, leading to a horrific tragedy. With nowhere left to go, Ines is fortunate to have been accepted into Catherine House, an elite, unconventional university. Isolated in the Pennsylvania woods, Catherine House’s campus is at once beautiful and moldering. Students agree that for three years they will focus solely on their course of study with no interaction with the outside world—no TV, no radio, no calls or visits home. The book’s mid-1990s means that students don’t have access to Wi-Fi or cellphones either. If they should fall behind in their studies or violate the university’s rules, they are sent to a facility called The Tower for “restoration” and contemplation.

Ines is never quite sold on Catherine House’s exclusive charms. While other students, like her roommate Baby, focus entirely on succeeding in the rigorous course study, Ines sees the decaying grandeur of Catherine House for what it is: an institution hiding secrets in plain sight. Among these secrets is the university’s research and highly secretive experiments into a mysterious substance called plasm.

Catherine House employs that wonderful Gothic convention of an inexplicable sense of wrongness, which pervades the narrative. We see the institution through Ines’ point of view; she craves its sanctuary, but is simultaneously also too cynical to accept it. There is never a moment when Ines, or the reader, can fully let her guard down and trust that any of Catherine House’s strange rituals and traditions are benign, and as Ines’ curiosity about plasm becomes a fixation, the atmosphere of the novel takes on an even more sinister feel.

Much of Catherine House is devoted to building the world that Ines and her friends inhabit, a narrative strategy that delays some of the suspense. However, by crafting a truly immersive experience, Thomas ratchets up the sense of dread as both Ines and readers begin to see Catherine House for what it truly is. With a compelling narrator and truly inventive setting, Catherine House embraces Gothic conventions even as it defies expectation and utilizes them in new and exciting ways. It challenges the genre while embracing it and takes readers on a truly unique journey.

Catherine House, the debut novel by Elisabeth Thomas, defies categorization; it is a coming-of-age story, a thriller, science-fiction and a Gothic novel all at once. These elements should feel incongruous, but in the strange world of Catherine House they blend together in a way that makes perfect internal sense. Ines is a young woman running […]
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Sunshine Vicram is one of those characters who is destined to win a cult following. Irreverent, intrepid and harboring secrets of her own, she won’t disappoint fans of Darynda Jones’ previous heroine, Charley Davidson. Jones shifts away from the paranormal in A Bad Day for Sunshine, which begins a new series—but her signature humor and suspense remain.

The town of Del Sol, New Mexico, is an idiosyncratic blend of quirky, lovable characters and well-kept secrets. Sunshine returns to her hometown after being elected sheriff, only to have a teenage girl vanish on her very first day. Eerily, Sybil St. Aubin had premonitions of her own kidnapping and mailed Sunshine a letter detailing her abduction prior to her disappearance. But that’s not the only twist: Sunshine herself was kidnapped as a teenager, a secret she and her family have been keeping to this day.

As the search for Sybil brings Sunshine’s repressed memories to the surface, it also introduces the reader to the diverse cast of characters populating Del Sol—from rooster thieves to former Dixie Mafia members to a mayor who wants Sunshine gone. We also meet Sunshine’s teenage daughter, Auri, who is an aspiring detective herself. As Sunshine investigates the disappearance, Auri canvasses her high school for information on the missing girl, giving us two detectives instead of just one.

Jones has a real talent for balancing suspense with laugh-out-loud humor, never losing the tension from either. Sunshine’s past is grim, as is the truth about Auri’s father, yet the book never feels bleak. The humor, sometimes absurd (like a basket of cursed muffins), never detracts from the gravity of the case Sunshine is investigating. It’s a delicate balancing act, and it’s pulled off with aplomb.

Jones opens the door for future romantic subplots as well, from Sunshine’s former crush turned distillery owner, to a U.S. Marshal on a manhunt of his own, to an FBI Agent assigned to assist in the case. With its wit and suspense, A Bad Day for Sunshine is a one-night read that left me craving the next installment in the series, especially after its truly surprising final reveal.

Sunshine Vicram is one of those characters who is destined to win a cult following. Irreverent, intrepid and harboring secrets of her own, she won’t disappoint fans of Darynda Jones’ previous heroine, Charley Davidson.

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Gytha Lodge’s sophomore thriller delivers an opening worthy of Hitchcock: Aidan is Skyping his girlfriend, Zoe, late at night when he sees someone enter her apartment. Helpless, he listens to the struggle that ends Zoe’s life, but Aidan isn’t willing to reveal himself to the police.

Like Lodge’s first novel She Lies in Wait, Watching From the Dark untangles the victim's complex personal relationships by alternating between the months before the murder and the investigation afterward. Zoe is a dynamic and compassionate woman, the glue that holds her dysfunctional friend group together. Struggling with everything from PTSD to narcissism, Zoe’s friends are occasionally manipulative and controlling. She is their support system and caretaker, and so when she becomes embroiled in a love affair that leaves her with less time for her friends, she begins to see the cracks in their one-sided relationships. Even her romance is fraught, though, as Aiden is secretive and dishonest with Zoe.

Lodge balances out all of this drama with the calm, steadfast demeanor of her series lead, DCI Jonah Sheens. Even as Zoe’s life unravels, Sheens’ constancy keeps the procedural aspect of the novel moving along smoothly, assuring the reader that the villain will eventually be revealed from among the ensemble cast.

The beauty of Lodge’s writing is her ability to juxtapose the careful sleuthing of a police procedural against an emotional deep dive into the lives of her characters.  Zoe is not just a body and a point of focus for Lodge’s male detective; rather, she is granted a complex identity. In a genre that often commodifies the bodies of dead women, the care given to Zoe’s character feels especially important.

As the novel wraps up, secrets are revealed and characters exposed for who they really are, the reader can fall back on Sheens’ reliability in an atmosphere where no one is trustworthy. Lodge’s autopsy of complicated friendships and love affairs feels occasionally tragic, but the justice that Sheens and his team deliver is eminently satisfying.

Gytha Lodge’s sophomore thriller delivers an opening worthy of Hitchcock: Aidan is Skyping his girlfriend, Zoe, late at night when he sees someone enter her apartment. Helpless, he listens to the struggle that ends Zoe’s life, but Aidan isn’t willing to reveal himself to the police.

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Screenwriter Christian White knows his way around a plot twist. Even the most die-hard thriller reader will be surprised at the direction The Wife and the Widow takes, but even without its truly shocking reveal, White’s thriller stands out for its penetrating examination of marriage and the lies that build between spouses.

Abby and her husband, Ray, are eking out a living on a gothic, windswept island off the coast of Victoria, Australia. When the police find the body of a man who died under suspicious circumstances, it disrupts the sleepy island community—and makes Abby notice how strangely Ray has been acting. Suddenly distant and secretive, Ray has disposed of his work clothes and can’t account for all his time away from home.

Just as Abby is struggling to reconcile her husband’s odd behavior, stay-at-home mom Kate is suddenly questioning everything she knows about her husband, John. After he doesn’t come home from what he said was a business trip, Kate learns that John quit his job three months ago. The only place she can think to look for her missing husband is the island where they own a vacation home.

White’s eerie, patient unraveling of small deceptions makes The Wife and the Widow a hypnotic reading experience. Both Kate and Abby’s worlds experience seismic shifts, but due to what appear to be, at first, trivial lies. Even as the suspense builds and trivial lies snowball into something much more devastating, a sense of sadness grounds the novel as Kate and Abby grieve for the relationships they thought they had. Unlike most domestic thrillers, the female leads here aren’t the victims of violence; rather their trauma comes from living lives they realize were permeated with lies. When the truth about John and Ray is finally revealed it feels explosive, but also like a relief from a nagging ache.

Heartbreaking and contemplative, The Wife and the Widow is one of those mysteries that lingers in the reader’s mind long after it is finished.

Screenwriter Christian White knows his way around a plot twist. Even the most die-hard thriller reader will be surprised at the direction The Wife and the Widow takes, but even without a truly shocking reveal, White’s thriller stands out for its penetrating examination of marriage and the lies that build between spouses.

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It’s almost impossible to properly summarize The Tenant; the careful plotting ensures that the mystery unfolds deliberately, with surprises regularly woven into the narrative. Reading it feels like watching a puzzle slowly come together before your eyes.

Set in Copenhagen, The Tenant follows detectives Jeppe Kørner and Anette Werner as they investigate the brutal murder of a young woman, Julie Stender. Adding a grisly twist to the case, Julie’s face was mutilated before her killing, a fact that chills both detectives. But it’s Julie’s relationship with her landlady, budding crime novelist Esther de Laurenti, which makes her murder truly bizarre—the young woman was killed in the same manner as the victim in Esther’s unpublished manuscript.

The Tenant operates with two ensemble casts: the tenants of Esther’s building and the detectives on the Copenhagen police force. While Kørner and Werner lead the charge to bring a killer to justice, it takes a plethora of characters to get the novel to its thrilling conclusion. The intensity of the relationships between characters realistically reflects the irritations and idiosyncrasies of people who live and work together. Unlike many other crime-solving duos, Kørner and Werner occasionally grate on each other’s nerves, never quite settling into anything other than a bristly professional relationship. Similarly, the people moving in and out of Esther’s orbit have their own secrets and agendas, giving the impression that no one can be trusted.

Despite its darker elements, The Tenant is a police procedural, not a thriller, and readers should prepare for a mystery that takes its time unfolding. This a positive thing; the easy pace lets the horror of Julie’s murder sink in. Author Katrine Engberg’s English-language debut is the first in a gritty, unflinching procedural series that has received multiple awards in her native Denmark. Readers will be left craving the translation of Kørner and Werner’s next adventure.

It’s almost impossible to properly summarize The Tenant; the careful plotting ensures that the mystery unfolds deliberately, with surprises regularly woven into the narrative. Reading it feels like watching a puzzle slowly come together before your eyes.

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Set in a small town obsessed with the occult, Trace of Evil by Alice Blanchard launches a promising new series and delivers an airtight police procedural with deeply macabre elements. This is a read-in-one-sitting book that will refresh readers who are potentially burned out on the genre.

With a Salem-esque history of killing suspected witches, the spooky little town of Burning Lake, New York, has turned its link to the dark arts into a tourist attraction. When a high school teacher is stabbed to death, homicide detective Natalie Lockhart turns her attention to a disaffected student who might have ties to a coven of teen witches. As if that’s not enough to keep her busy, Natalie is also working on a cold case of nine Burning Lake residents who went missing over the years, with only strange graffiti and creepy fetishes made of dead birds left behind.

While Trace of Evil utilizes paranormal themes like witchcraft, it remains firmly grounded in reality, never crossing the line into a supernatural thriller. What we get instead is a procedural that expertly balances three mysteries at one time with tight plotting and enough clues and red herrings to keep the most experienced of mystery readers conjuring up theory after theory. And truly, Blanchard doesn’t need to utilize the supernatural to make her novel chilling. From the deeply disturbing aspects of the nine disappearances to the teenage obsession with witchcraft (I remember my own love of The Craft at a similar age), the terror here is tied to people who feel so detached from the world around them that they normalize horrifying violence.

Adding to the perfectly executed mysteries and the real-world terror is Blanchard’s careful world building. This is the first book starring Natalie Lockhart, but she appears on the page like a friend readers have known forever. She is the lens through which we view her small town, and she adds an element of empathy to characters who might otherwise feel unsympathetic to the reader. Then there’s the frisson of forbidden sexual tension between Natalie and her boss, a subplot that promises to unwind later in the series. It may seem like a lot to balance within one novel, but Trace of Evil delivers all of these elements without a single misstep.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Alice Blanchard about Trace of Evil.

Set in a small town obsessed with the occult, Trace of Evil by Alice Blanchard launches a promising new series and delivers an airtight police procedural with deeply macabre elements. This is a read-in-one-sitting book that will refresh readers who are potentially burned out on the genre.

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The moment you think you have the latest Valerie Hart thriller figured out, Saul Black takes the narrative in a new and stunning direction. Exquisitely plotted, this police procedural unravels with the deftness and striking prose that Black fans have come to expect.

The plot of Anything For You hinges on the personal dysfunctions of two women who occupy vastly different spaces—one a homicide detective and one a killer—but feel remarkably alike in their intelligence and canny ability to read others. Valerie Hart is a seasoned homicide investigator with the San Francisco Police Department, and she’s working to stifle her self-destructive tendencies (booze, promiscuous sex and an addiction to work, to name a few) in order to make her marriage work. She’s even contemplating having a child; it's an idea that terrifies her as much as it excites her.

Valerie’s latest case is an example of how her personal life and work have become toxically entangled: The victim, prosecutor Adam Grant, once spent a night in her bed. Grant was brutally killed in his own home, with his wife barely surviving the attack. At first, it seems a cut-and-dry case in which a former inmate with a grudge against Grant is the perpetrator. But as Valerie digs deeper she learns that both Grant and the ex-con were linked by a mysterious escort known only as Sophia. Valerie knows she should remove herself from the case due to personal conflict, but she’s too invested to let go.

There’s an icy self-awareness and a self-deprecation to both Valerie and Sophia that helps them transcend typical femme fatale stereotypes. Black gives Sophia, in particular, a complex and sometimes unsettling back story that makes her feel like more of an anti-heroine than a villainess. By the time Valerie is closing in on her quarry, we are so invested in both of these characters, and in the incredibly intricate plot, that it is almost a disappointment to see the mystery solved. Black blends nuanced characters, immersive prose and complex plotlines so skillfully that it feels practically magical. When Valerie and Sophia finally meet face-to-face, readers will be breathless with anticipation and the promise of delicious secrets being revealed.

The moment you think you have the latest Valerie Hart thriller figured out, Saul Black takes the narrative in a new and stunning direction. Exquisitely plotted, this police procedural unravels with the deftness and striking prose that Black fans have come to expect.

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If you take the John Wick and “Sons of Anarchy” series, blend them with the movie Taken and then dial the intensity up to 11, you have Seven Crows. This gritty thriller unapologetically celebrates its violent antihero, ex-con Killian Delaney, as she navigates the criminal underworld in search of her missing niece.

Killian Delaney grew up in a tough world. Before most people were graduating college, she was the “Old Lady” (aka girlfriend) to a member of the Crows motorcycle club, as well as a celebrated MMA fighter. When her boyfriend was gunned down in a hit by another club, Killian found the man responsible, Rank Cirello, and almost killed him, leaving him permanently disabled and in chronic pain. After nearly a decade in prison, Killian is out on parole, but Rank hasn’t forgotten her. His payback? To kidnap Killian’s 15-year-old niece Shannon and traffic her on the illegal sex market. This plot sounds dark, and it is, but it’s also surprisingly satisfying.

Seven Crows opens with a bang and doesn’t slow down. Spanning only a few days, the action is compressed into a breathless timeline. Killian recruits some of her old criminal friends and makes a few new ones as she (sometimes literally) burns through the underworld in search of Shannon. There are plenty of casualities along the way, but Killian never slows down in her pursuit and never flinches away from the trauma she inflicts.

This novel is staggeringly violent, but its violence feels almost cathartic, rather than gratuitous. Killian and Shannon live in a world dominated by dangerous men who commoditize (literally) the women around them. In one scene, Killian and an accomplice tear through a brothel that sells underage girls with brass knuckles and a shot gun, and it’s impossible to feel anything but a sense of justice watching them put these predators out of business. That said, I must add the caveat that, in keeping with its tone, the book references sexual assault in a candid and descriptive way that may be off-putting to some readers.

The ending of Seven Crows hints at the beginning of a series and I hope that comes to fruition. In the era of #MeToo, vicariously experiencing Killian’s brutal form of justice feels just right, rather than too much.

If you take the John Wick and “Sons of Anarchy” series, blend them with the movie Taken and then dial the intensity up to 11, you have Seven Crows. This gritty thriller unapologetically celebrates its violent antihero, ex-con Killian Delaney, as she navigates the criminal underworld in search of her missing niece.

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It’s evident from the first page of Clear My Name that Paula Daly’s heroine, investigator Tess Gilroy, is as adept at keeping secrets as she is at uncovering them. Between Tess and Carrie, the woman she’s trying to prove innocent of murder, we’re left with two narrators who are simultaneously sympathetic and also inherently unreliable. Add exquisite pacing and a plot with some real twists, and you have a recipe for a book bound to keep you up all night.

A former probation officer, Tess is now the chief investigator for a group called Innocence UK that works to free the wrongfully convicted. Her latest case brings her back home to the small town she fled. She’s investigating the murder conviction of Carrie Kamara, a woman serving a 15-year sentence for killing her husband’s mistress. Many of the details surrounding Carrie’s case seem weak and the police work potentially shoddy, but Carrie was never able to account for how her blood was found in the victim’s home. That forensic detail was enough to see her incarcerated.

Even as Tess digs into Carrie’s deeply troubled marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, we can sense her unease at being back home. Tess thinks she’s being followed, and she’s avoiding contact with someone from her past. The competing mysteries of Tess’ past and Carrie’s true involvement in the murder make Clear My Name feel tightly wound, with threads of paranoia woven throughout. Tess is used to false claims of innocence, and even as she is reluctant to believe Carrie, we know we also cannot trust Tess.

Eventually Tess’ and Carrie’s narratives collide in a way that is genuinely shocking. The last quarter of this mystery doesn’t so much as unfold as it explodes; the tension is at a fever pitch and the final revelations are genuinely surprising.

With a wonderfully executed mystery and two unreliable narrators, Clear My Name straddles the line between psychological thriller and good old-fashioned whodunit.

It’s evident from the first page of Clear My Name that Paula Daly’s heroine, investigator Tess Gilroy, is as adept at keeping secrets as she is at uncovering them.

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Ruth Ware’s homage to The Turn of the Screw is filled with all of the best gothic elements: an unreliable narrator, an isolated setting, creepy children and a house that functions as its own menacing character. Part epistolary novel, part psychological thriller, The Turn of the Key is compulsively readable and will keep readers guessing until the very last page.

Rowan Caine worries that the live-in nanny job she’s secured may be a little too good to be true. The pay is outstanding, the residence is a beautiful estate in the Scottish Highlands, and the parents want her to start right now. Almost immediately her fears are validated. Her charges, 8-year-old Maddie and 5-year-old Ellie, are fractious and have already burned through several caregivers. The home, Heatherbrae House, is a “smart home,” where every convenience is controlled by an app named “Happy” and every room except the bathrooms are monitored by security cameras. Left alone with two mutinous charges and a house that can be controlled remotely is enough to stretch Rowan to her last nerve.

Those elements are certainly chilling enough (especially when the “Happy” app nightmarishly malfunctions), but Ware expertly weaves in a supernatural element as well. Already fraught, Rowan begins experiencing strange events, like the sound of someone pacing in the supposedly empty, walled-off space above her room, and when objects start going missing or moving seemingly on their own. Then there is the story of a small girl who tragically died of an accidental poisoning in the house decades earlier.

A rational person might quit, but as the novel progresses, we learn that Rowan has secrets of her own, ones she certainly doesn’t want her employers uncovering. All of these twists and turns might feel unwieldy in the hands of another writer, but Ware is adept at managing multiple plot threads and using them to shock her reader.

The beauty of The Turn of the Key is in how it takes the tropes central to the gothic genre, like the isolated haunted house, and gives them a 21st-century spin while still managing to feel fresh and surprising to even the most gothic-averse reader.

Straddling the line between horror and thriller, this novel will delight fans of both genres.

Part epistolary novel, part psychological thriller, The Turn of the Key is compulsively readable and will keep readers guessing until the very last page.

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